---
title: Causal Process Discovery
type: concept
tags: [process-mining, causal-inference, discovery]
sources: ["[[sources/2025-fournier-agentic-ai-process-observability]]"]
created: 2026-04-15
updated: 2026-04-15
---

# Causal Process Discovery

A family of techniques that infer **causal** execution dependencies — as opposed to merely temporal/frequency-based precedence — from process event logs. Distinguishes cause–effect directionality from correlation (Spirtes, Glymour, Scheines; Pearl).

Prior work in the BPM community (Hompes et al. 2017; Alaee, Weidlich, Senderovich 2024; Narendra et al. 2019; Leemans & Tax 2022 *(all referenced-not-ingested)*) typically extracts causal graphs from process KPIs or decision points. Fournier, Limonad, Skarbovsky, David 2025 (*The WHY in Business Processes*) infer causal graphs directly from activity timestamps by adapting LiNGAM-style discovery (Shimizu 2022).

In [[sources/2025-fournier-agentic-ai-process-observability]] the same machinery is applied to **agent execution trajectories**, producing an agent-centric causal view whose gateways reveal functional dependencies among tool invocations and split points marking behavioral variability.

## Philosophical framing
"Causal" in *causal process discovery* carries all the philosophical commitments of [[concepts/causation]]. Timestamp-based discovery (LiNGAM, Granger-style tests) is closer to a [[concepts/regularity-theory-of-causation|regularity]]/[[concepts/probabilistic-causation|probability-raising]] theory; functional dependency discovery on agent trajectories is closer to [[concepts/interventionist-theory-of-causation|interventionist]] / mechanistic reasoning ([[concepts/mechanisms-in-science]]). No single method captures every symptom of causation, so [[concepts/methodological-pluralism|plural methods]] are warranted ([[sources/2023-anjum-rocca-phi403-lecture-20-plural-methods-one-causation]]).

## Related
[[concepts/process-discovery]] · [[concepts/agent-process-observability]] · [[concepts/behavioral-variability]] · [[concepts/causation]] · [[concepts/mechanisms-in-science]]